A burnt-out car at Kinglake after the 'Black Saturday' bushfires

CSIRO is a participating agency in the Bushfire Cooperative Research Centre which has been looking at the key issues in the February 2009 bushfires.

The CRC’s Bushfire Research Task Force includes researchers from various state fire agencies and research organisations with expertise in building analysis, human behaviour, community education, bushfire behaviour, fire weather, and fire investigation. The purpose of the research is to provide fire and land management agencies with independent analyses of the factors surrounding the Victorian fires.

CSIRO researchers from the Bushfire Dynamics and Applications Group, the Bushfire Urban Design project and the Remote Sensing team, will be involved with two areas of research:

strategic fire behaviour - how the fires moved across different landscapes and different vegetation and under variable weather conditions

building (infrastructure) and planning issues - patterns of loss and patterns of survival of build